Facebook AI Said to Significantly Improve Urdu to English Translation

Indo-Asian News Service, 03 September 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at Facebook have set a new record in improving translation from Urdu to English. The team used Neural Machine Translation (NMT), an AI-based translation technology.

The team from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has seen a dramatic improvement in its results, Forbes reported on Saturday.

"To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points," the team said in a paper that described translation from Urdu to English.

The research covers the full spectrum of topics related to AI, and to deriving knowledge from data: theory, algorithms, applications, software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure.

"Long-term objectives of understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines are bold and ambitious, and we know that making significant progress towards AI can't be done in isolation," said researchers from FAIR.

FAIR researchers have tested a new approach that teaches bots how to chit-chat like humans.

Facebook is making deep investments in AI technology and in May announced the next version of its open-source AI framework for developers.

Microsoft is is also using AI and Deep Neural Networks to improve real-time language translation.